Time for Part Three of creating a great plan. Part Three is where you can start to get in action! Part Three is identifying the gaps – what’s missing that you will need to create, develop, learn, find, buy or hire to get you from where you are now to where you want to be.
Again, before we go further, let’s recap the four parts of your plan:
1. Clearly defined end goal, in detail, with specific end results occurring in real time (Where are you going?)
2. Clearly defined current circumstances, including financial and personal resources, skill sets, network resources, knowledge resources, etc. (Where are you now?)
3. Clearly defined gaps – identify what is missing from where you are now that you will need to develop, find or create to get you to the end goal (What’s missing that you need?)
4. A strategy for addressing the identified gaps, including specific action steps to address each specific problem or gap (What’s the best way to get there from here?)
And now on to part three…If you have done a thorough and detailed job with parts one and two, part three flows really easily. In fact, you almost can’t help yourself from jumping right into identifying the gaps, once you’ve clearly defined for yourself both the end goal and where you are now.
Many things just leap to mind – “I need an accountant,” “I need a web designer,” “I need business cards,” “I need to come up with a business name,” “I need to open up a business account,” “I need to decide if this will be a sole proprietorship, LLC, S-Corp – I need to do some research!” and so on, and so on!
It can seem like an avalanche, and the key is to stay organized. At this stage, that fundamentally means two things:
- Write everything down, and then
- Prioritize
When I say write it all down, that means you need to have something with you all the time to capture it all, because ideas will be coming all over the place. You’ll be falling asleep and suddenly think of a great domain name. You’ll be having lunch with a friend and they’ll point out something you hadn’t thought of – capture it!
A good practice to be in is to have a small notebook with you all the time so you can capture the gaps as they occur to you and then add them to the list. This is an ongoing process, of course – throughout the life of your business you will be identifying gaps between where you are and where you want to be – but it pays off big time to dedicate time to identifying the gaps you can see early on.
Don’t let yourself get distracted from the task of identifying all the gaps that you possibly can – it’s easy to jump into addressing certain problems and then get caught up in that and forget to keep looking for the other gaps.
You really want to discipline yourself to create as exhaustive a list of gaps as you can. Once you have that list, you can start to prioritize them, both in order of importance and on a timeline.
That really all there is to this part – it’s not complicated! But it is really important.
You can see that once you have identified 1) where you are going, 2) where you are now and 3) what the gaps are, you now have what you need to create the one thing most small businesses never create (or never create well) — a strategy.
A strategy is more than a plan about how to get from A to B. A strategy is a plan that answers the question, “What is the best way to get from A to B?”
I just want to repeat that, because it’s a really important distinction.
A strategy is the answer to the question, “What is the best way to get from A to B?”
And that is part four – which is what my next post will be about.
